Motivation:

The paper went through three rounds of review by 2 clueless reviewers, one of whom was probably the editor. One reviewer went completely wild in the first round about how invalid one of our methods was (and obviously didn't know what it was); after we defended it the same reviewer acted like an expert in that method and accused us of not applying it carefully (my co-authors are world experts in the method!). The second reviewer (who was probably the editor) didn't read past the introduction. After two rounds of review, the second reviewer finally read the paper and raised totally off-the-wall objections. The editor finally accepted the paper conditional on us making changes that would produce an invalid analysis, so we withdrew it instead.